betabrain wrote:my sata drive (on a pci sata card) works fine with linux but some distros (including my fav, mint) will fail to boot 90% of the time due to the long time it takes to detect the card/drive.is there a way to delay the timeout by about 10 seconds (it usually detects the drive about 5 seconds after the failure)?i can send a failed and/or successful bootlog if it will help.

I've seen this problem on Dell PCs, it can be fixed by adding "pollirq" to the kernel boot options in /boot/grub/menu.lst.